The night deepens around me and I hear the animals venture closer. My presence scared them away at first but I am so silent and still they have become careless and my scent is no longer a new one.

She puts down the book and walks to the window. Maribel looks straight at me, if only she knew it. If her eyes were like mine she would see me watching her, waiting for her. Small, pale hands grip the window pane and her arms shake with the effort of sliding it open. She closes her eyes, sighing as the cool night air kisses her. I hate the wind too. It roams freely over her lips, face and neck with an abandon I can only dream of.

The night is too hot for her. She lifts her damp hair from her neck and the scent of her blood and her sweat slam into me across the small, dark clearing. I close my eyes to suppress the beast inside me roaring in response to such torture. When I open them, her light is off but the darkness hides nothing from me. I see as she rips off her night clothes and slips between the sheets.

The breeze steals into her room and carries her intoxicating fragrance back to me. The demon rises in me afresh, taking my thoughts to a place they long to go but dare not linger – to an image of her shaking and gasping under me as my mouth steals the life from her while my body worships her.

Sleep comes quickly for Maribel and I give up the fight to stay away and glide to her window, succumbing to the siren call of her scent, to crouch on her sill. Entering her room, her inner sanctum, feels like entering her.

I turn to her mirror and wonder whether my reflection, if I had one, would show the wild, dark haired devil of my true nature or the handsome man inside whom he resides. Maribel was afraid of me the last time we met because she sensed the evil in me. My demon greeted her that night, and she recognised his nature even if she wasn’t conscious of it.

I sink to the floor beside her bed, savouring the memory of her fear. Her blood called to me then as the adrenaline had rushed through her veins, like some cruel joke of nature. The very urge for survival in a human was the one my kind relied upon. Any distaste for what we were about to do would disappear once we heard a racing pulse and sensed the terror in a trembling heart. Instinct would take over and the victim, who had doubted at first their fear was rational, would be rewarded with the knowledge they had been right all along.

Maribel turns over in her sleep, kicking away the tangle of blankets around her legs. Her almost irresistible aroma invades me moments before another far more deadly one hits.

Sex.

Maribel’s sex.

I close my eyes and slump to the floor, made weak by my desire for her. I ball my fist into my mouth and bite down, causing a pain that does nothing but intensify my arousal. I bite myself so I will not bite her. Not yet.

I crawl to the bottom of her bed and slide higher, my nose millimetres from her skin, drinking her in. The siren song of her blood and sex mix and intoxicate me, and I avert my gaze when I near her most sensitive part, afraid that a closer look at the moist, warm pink flesh will be too much for me to bear. I don’t want to bite her yet.